I can’t afford to despise anything. An absurdity may be the starting-point of the most dangerous complications.
To cut oneself entirely from one’s kind is impossible. To live in a desert one must be a saint.
It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe.
I am quite willing to be the blind instrument of higher ends. To give one’s life for the cause is nothing. But to have one’s illusions destroyed – that is really almost more than one can bear.
The value of a sentence is the personality that utters’t, for nothing new can be said by any man or woman.
Mistah Kurtz – he dead.
It was not my strength that wanted nursing, it was my imagination that wanted soothing.
I remembered the old doctor, – “It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot.” I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.
Perhaps on some quiet night the tremor of far-off drums, sinking, swelling, a tremor vast, faint; a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.
In a few moments all the stars came out above the intense blackness of the earth and the great lagoon gleaming suddenly with reflected lights resembled an oval patch of night sky flung down into the hopeless and abysmal night of the wilderness.
La fuerza no es sino una casualidad nacida de la debilidad de los otros.
One must not make too much of anything in life, good or bad.
It is a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine.
Everybody had to be thoroughly understood before being accepted.
Everything can be found at sea according to the spirit of your quest.
The last thing a woman will consent to in a man whom she loves, or on whom she simply depends, is want of courage.
The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.
It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self knowledge.
A historian may be an artist too, and a novelist is a historian, the preserver, the keeper, the expounder, of human experience.
God is for men, and religion for women.